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What we do get for the overall well-over-a-trillion in yearly military spending is…a hollowed-out military that doesn’t even have enough ammunition to defend the United States!

So both the Bell-Textron with the 360 Invictus and Sikorsky with its Raider X were funded and developed these past five years with more than two billion dollars and…suddenly…the Pentagon said, “never mind.”

by Daniel McAdams

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/welfare-for-the-rich

(This article first appeared as an exclusive update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.)

Why does the US military budget keep skyrocketing? The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2024 passed in December came in at a whopping $841.1 billion, and that’s just part of the total amount that will be spent on military-related issues this year. Just this weekend, for example, the Senate cleared the way for a nearly $100 billion in additional spending to boost the military capabilities of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan!

What do we get for all that spending? A military that can do whatever it takes to defend the United States? A military whose mere formidable existence acts as a deterrent to any would-be invaders of our geographically unique country surrounded by a massive moat? We shouldn’t be naive! 

What we do get for the overall well-over-a-trillion in yearly military spending is…a hollowed-out military that doesn’t even have enough ammunition to defend the United States!

We get a military that is so unattractive to young people that they have had to make radical reforms in desperate attempt to recover from the recruiting death-spiral – including, in the US Navy at least, abandoning the requirement to have any educational credential at all, including a high school diploma or GED. Prospective US Navy personnel need only score 50 or above out of 99 on the notoriously rudimentary ASVAB test (that means with a score of 50% – which in the real world is a failing grade – you’re in!).

But surely for all those billions we are getting weapons that are absolutely crushing it on the battlefield? Not exactly. As we have seen for two years on the Ukraine battlefield of the US proxy war against Russia, each new “wonder weapon” sent by the Pentagon – starting with Javelins and continuing through HIMARS, Bradley fighting vehicles, M1A1 Abrams tanks, and even the new Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (which are so new the Pentagon itself doesn’t yet have them in its arsenal) – is quickly defeated by Russian counter-measures. 

Even the rabidly pro-war and anti-Russia Washington Post – the Pravda of our regime – is admitting that Ukraine is headed for defeat. The Pentagon – and NATO – has sent all they had into Ukraine to fight Russia and still it is losing. 

How could it be that we spend orders of magnitude more on the military than a country like Russia and still are being bettered on the battlefield? It is not that our servicemembers are sub-par or that the US is incapable of technical and industrial innovation. 

The problem is very different. It has to do with a deeply broken system that serves not US security, but special interests.

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